Retro classic SpaceWar! on the iPhone
The oldest game is now on the newest platform
They don’t come much more retro than Steve Russell’s PDP-1 computer game, SpaceWar!. If you count a game of noughts and crosses and a tennis simulation that ran on an oscilloscope from the ‘50s, then SpaceWar! was the third computer game ever made, back in 1962.
Not a bad lineage, especially considering it inspired Nolan Bushnell to create the first ever coin-op arcade game and found Atari, and now it’s appeared on the iPhone some 46 years after it first made frivolous use of the world’s most cutting edge technology.
Space War Classic features the same gravity/inertia-based physics to simulate two spacecraft fighting it out while orbiting a star. The gravitational pull of the star affects the ships and their missiles, and can be played either against the CPU or another player via local network.
It might not jump off the screen, but anyone even vaguely interested in computer game history ought to swing by the App Store and check this one out - a few minutes circling the gravity well and you'll realise just how influential SpaceWar! has really been.
This is probably the most retro game currently on the App Store, and unless we see a port of Tennis for Two it’s likely to stay that way. It’s just a shame that Steve Russell never actually made a penny from essentially inventing the computer games industry. Nice to see he's not been forgotten, though.
